With Trinity seeking to reassess and redesign how it teaches and assesses students with the Trinity Education Project, College is exploring how best to acknowledge and support students in activities outside of the classroom, and how these activities can be leveraged to create the sort of graduates that it’s looking to develop.
The Trinity Education Project, a university-wide project looking to reimagine how Trinity’s undergraduate students are taught, prepared and assessed, will see the curriculum, assessment and academic year structure change across the board in Trinity. With the project now in its penultimate phase and looking towards implementation, new strands of the project have begun, with one of these strands focused on extra and co-curricular activities.
While co-curricular activities are those that are formally recognised by the College, such as in an expanded college record, extra-curricular activities are those not formally recognised. These activities include those typically engaged with by students, from involvement with societies and sports clubs to volunteering and work placements. The project’s interim report states that these activities “provide an extension to a student’s university studies and complement the academic curriculum” and “promote the student’s academic, personal and professional development”.
With the project having identified four “graduate attributes” – four key attributes that Trinity wants every graduate to have – the question is how the College can ensure that students gain these skills: to “think independently”, “communicate effectively”, “develop continuously” and “act responsibly”. While the nature of Trinity’s curriculum and assessment certainly comes into play here, and the College is revising its structures to maximise this, there remains, as Education Officer of Trinity College Dublin Students’ Union (TCDSU), Dale Whelehan, explains to The University Times, “a general consensus among staff, and I think students as well, that not all of the attributes could be fully given by the Trinity academic curriculum and the co- and extra-curricular activities were important in achieving those”.
In order to figure out how best to recognise students’ work outside of the classroom, the strand must first identify what kind of activities students undertake and how these activities can contribute to these graduates attributes. Trinity then has then to look at how these activities can be measured and, ultimately, supported by the College structure in everything from timetabling to college policies.
Of course, the college cannot assert that students should place increased focus on these extra activities without facilitating students in doing so. Speaking to The University Times, Prof Kevin O’Kelly, Dean of Students and sponsor of the strand, explained that the strand would be “feeding into all the changes that will be happening in terms of timetables and things just to make sure that students can do that”. O’Kelly adds that the strand will be looking at how the “policies and procedures of the College” can further support students.
Moves have already been made to change the timetable in this way. On June 28th, University Council approved changes to the academic year structure that would, alongside the introduction of a Christmas exam week and a two-week earlier start to the academic year, see the teaching day end at 6pm. The new structure also aims to see an overall reduction in the number of exams sat by students, reducing the number of formal examination weeks from four to two and calling for a diversification of the way that students are assessed.
This report, brought to this meeting of University Council and seen by The University Times, states that the reduction “sends a clear message as to the type and extent of the cultural change which we wish to bring about in terms of how we assess and how much we assess”.
Another proposal brought to that meeting would have allowed for an afternoon with no timetabled teaching, allowing students to engage with activities beyond the classroom. The report did not advocate for this structure, however, stating that it “creates a number of challenges, for which we do not see ready solutions”.
The strand comprises of representatives from Trinity Volunteering, the Alumni Foundation and representatives from all the capitated bodies: TCDSU, the Graduates Students’ Union (GSU), Dublin University Central Athletics Association (DUCAC), Trinity Publications and the Central Societies Committee (CSC). Whelehan states: “I suggested that within that, that the capitated bodies meet with their own student representatives and find out what their student wants. So it’s not just the head of the CSC, or the head of DUCAC. There’s just a variety there between the Head of the Phil or an [Ordinary Committee Member] on a smaller committee. Those sorts of things have to be ironed out.”
The aim is for these activities to be as integral to a Trinity student’s education and experience as their academic work. Indeed, a report on the graduate attributes brought to University Council on June 8th states: “The Trinity Curriculum is composed of the academic curriculum (credit-bearing) and the co-and-extra-curricular (non-credit-bearing).”
The question of how best to acknowledge such activities alongside academic work is, thus, key to the project’s success and for this aim to become reality rather than an abstract wish. O’Kelly states that the strand is “looking at how best to capture this activity. Because what’s very clear is you can let students and facilitate students doing all this, but unless they come back and reflect on it, they miss an awful lot”.
For O’Kelly, simply stating a list of positions on a CV doesn’t go far enough in capturing the benefits of these activities for students: “So they might say ‘well, I was captain of the squash team’, and they end it there, and that’s the line on their CV. But what does that mean? Well it means leadership, it means project management, it means communication skills, and to be able to translate these into things that give them much more translatable skills for when they go for job applications or even in their jobs.” Existing systems such as the Student 2 Student (S2S) peer mentoring or the College Tutor system offer a way to get students to reflect in this manner: “You can’t ask for reflection with groups of 500.”
When it comes to how best to capture these activities, however, decisions are still to be made. One possibility suggested by O’Kelly is something like an e-portfolio system “that can concretely capture what they’re doing”.
One aspect that seems clear is that such work will not go towards college credits. For Whelehan, the logistical difficulties alone present a barrier: “It would be such a difficult process to try grade that, a student’s experience.” Indeed, at a public forum on April 18th, chaired by then-Vice-Provost, Linda Hogan, academics seemed unconvinced by the idea that such activities would be formally assessed in this way.
“There’s a strong feeling, mostly from the students, that this should not be credit bearing”, says O’Kelly. “It won’t be credit bearing. That’s pretty certain at this stage.”
“It distorts the motivations and puts a totally different value [for] students on it. Students want to do this, and they’re doing it anyway, and really what we need to do is to facilitate it.”
